[Edu-sig] Re: PEP0238 lament

[Guido van Rossum]

Arthur Siegel and I seem to be pushing each other's buttons
constantly.  I don't know why it is, but ever post of his feels like a
flame or flamebait to me.  I always feel that he attacks me as a
person rather than attacking my arguments (usually because he claims
that I haven't given any arguments).  Try as I may, this makes it very
hard, almost impossible for me to respond in a meaningful manner to
Arthur's posts.  I wonder what I've done to tick him off.  I also
wonder how come he is so good at ticking me off.

The reason for wanting / to return a float (or at least a type that
can represent close approximations of numbers like 0.75) has been
discussed many times before.  The summary of the argument in the PEP
may not be complete, but I disagree with Arthur's assessment that
integer division is not a problem -- the VPython folks have ample
experience that it is.

Because all Arthur does is tick me off, I'll leave it at this -- maybe
someone else can explain it all to him.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)